A NEW DAWN

The rise, fall and rise again of PC GAMING IN JAPAN

- DR MARCO ZANGIROLAMI

The so-called 'Paso Kon' market (ie katakana's transliteration of 'Pasonaru Computa') in Japan was originally spearheaded in the 1980s by NEC's PC-8800 and, later, its PC-9800.

However, in terms of quality, Fujitsu's FM Towns and the Sharp X1, as well as the mighty Sharp X68000 (the latter being the high-end of the Japanese PC gaming experience in the late '80s and early '90s, one that boasted an arcade perfect port of After Burner) ended up in a world of their own power-wise, dominating higher-end PC gaming.

Despite this, the home computer market in Japan at the time ended up being led in terms of architecture by Ascii's MSX (a Microsoft-Sony and Panasonic joint venture), while in Europe there was a battle between Commodore's Amiga and the ST from Atari (run by Commodore's former president Jack Tramiel, no less), and so naturally many games and pieces of software were made for them. However, this focus ended quite dramatically in Japan in mid-1992 when Nintendo's incredibly arcade-faithful Super Famicom conversion of Street Fighter II came out, and id Software released the groundbreaking Wolfenstein 3D, demonstrating it was PCs, not consoles, that had the gaming edge.